The good bad stuff

Bad because it’s good. So good that the McDonalds people force you at gunpoint to have two at once. And if you don’t eat them, you die of lead poisoning.

Eating two of course, is more than your body needs. Keep going like that and no wonder we’re all fat like two-thirds of us are.

Which is the reality of course.

It’s not “junk food” that makes us fat. It’s eating too much of the stuff.

Too much of those cheap , nutrition-rich, hunger-busting fast foods that are everybody’s on-the-go favourite. Grab ’em and eat ’em, just as you like – burgers, hot dogs, fish & chips, pizza, kebabs, sliders, sandwiches – they all fill you up in minutes.

Same thing with Coke. Buy two, or the Coca-Cola people will chase you down the street with a knife. Make that the two-litre bottle, they’re not playing around. And drinking that much in one go will make you fat too.

And there’s the proof, see? That junk food will be the death of us. At least so says the latest report by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Child Health.

Nice try, but not true.

Overeating compulsion

If it were, we’d have all been fat decades ago. From 1940, when the first McDonalds opened. Or 1892, when Coca-Cola started.

Sure, there were fat people around then, but not like there are now. Back in those days, most of us were slim. Thin as a rake, and pretty with it.

Same thing in the 50s. And the 60’s. The 70s, the 80’s and even the 90’s.

We ate fast food in those days too. And drank Coke. Yet somehow we never got fat. The typical British male was just over 5ft 7in tall, weighed 11st 6lbs, had a chest of 37 inches, a waist of 34 inches, wore size seven shoes and had a collar size of 14.

Sound fat to you?

Yes, we guzzled the stuff and enjoyed it. But never too much, like we do now.

So what’s different? What’s the CAUSE? What’s suddenly making us eat too much in the last twenty years?

“Ooh , er… lifestyle” say the medics, clutching at straws.

What, we didn’t have telly in those days? No Corrie, no Fawlty Towers, no Dr Who, no Steptoe?

And we didn’t have computers? No Atari, no Amstrad, no Apple, no Commodore Vic?

Alongside McDonalds and Coke and all the others of course?

Either that’s porkies, or the wrong end of the stick.

And since the Royal College would NEVER be anything but upright and honest, it has to be the stick thing.

So what’s happened in the last twenty years to make us eat too much now?

The awful answer

Ask the medics, because they already know the answer. They just don’t want to face the consequences of living with it.

There’s a whole INDUSTRY of making bodies eat too much. It’s worldwide too, in every modern country.

It’s called growth promoting, and it’s used in food production everywhere you can think of.

It started slow at first, a side effect of the miracle breakthrough of the Twentieth Century, antibiotics. Researchers found that small doses, fed regularly to livestock, caused them to bulk up and develop at lightning speed compared to ordinary farm animals.

Bingo!

Scientists weren’t sure WHY it happened, they only knew it did. Something that accelerated the body’s “I’m hungry” ghrelin hormone and suppressed the “I’ve had enough” leptin one.

Farmers couldn’t believe their luck. And with world population rocketing from 2½ billion back in the 50s to the 7½ billion we are now, they didn’t hang about. All those people needed feeding, and how. Boom time!

Growth boosters worldwide

OK, it took a while to get organised. Farms were small in the 50s, family-run businesses, unchanged for generations. Big money changed all that. First, broiler houses for chickens, factory farms on an industrial scale – and latest, the big-bucks CAFOs, Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations.

ALL of them shovelling in antibiotics like it was going out of fashion. 240,000 tonnes of them every year, worldwide. Poultry, cattle, sheep, pigs, fish – everything. Plant crops and vegetables too. Fertilised by manure from those same animals.

So guess what? Just about every food type in your supermarket became laced through with the most successful growth booster ever invented. And we gobble them, mini-dose by mini-dose with every mouthful. Turning on our own ghrelin and turning off our own leptin.

Which means a fat lot of good sugar tax and banning fast food adverts in TV is going to achieve. Like tax on cigarettes never stopped smokers – and tax on alcohol never stopped boozers – us fatties are going to keep munching anyway, no matter how hard the Royal College try to stop us.

Not that they will. Their view on antibiotics is firmly fixed in another direction – antimicrobial resistance. Because of overuse and abuse of antibiotics for anything and everything, bacteria are increasingly becoming immune to our miracle life-savers.

Which puts modern medicine in total jeopardy. Just about every major medical procedure is rapidly becoming impossible because the antibiotics don’t work. No less a person than Dr Dame Sally Davies, England’s Chief Medical Officer, has voiced that we are poised at a new Dark Ages.

Antibiotics resistance

No more heart transplants, hip replacements or caesarean births – in our lifetime we could any of us die from a paper cut.

None of which helps obesity – which is its own road to a slow and unpleasant death. Asthma, limb amputations, heart disease and cancer are all waiting in follow-up. And two-thirds of us are already on the way.

Yes, we can give up antibiotics. Stop eating the foods that contain them, like the all-natural, organic brigade. Not just the junk food but everything. Expensive – but doable.

But then we’ll need to up our game on hygiene. Because the only way to stay healthy will be to avoid germs altogether. Wash hands all the time, sterilise everything – stay out of trouble before it starts. Doable – and NOT expensive. We just need to overcome our laziness.

There’s only one problem. There’s 5 billion more of us than there were back in the 50s. We still need the 19 billion chickens, 1.4 billion cattle, 1 billion pigs and 1 billion sheep that currently feed us – and the antibiotics that keep them alive as well as fatten them. Forced production farming is so intensive, animals live on top of each other in appalling hygiene conditions.

Nope, we can’t all eat organic. There’s not enough land or produce to sustain us.

Our glorious end

Maybe all those big mouth politicians with their nuclear button-pressing threats have the answer. One press and foops! We don’t have to worry any more.

Hypersteriliser units are supplied to businesses and institutions across the UK, notably the haematology and other critical units at Salford Royal Hospital, Greater Manchester; Doncaster & Bassetlaw Hospital; South Warwickshire Hospital; Coventry & Warwickshire Hospital; and Queen Victoria Hospital, East Grinstead.

The Halo Hypersteriliser system achieves 6-log Sterility Assurance Level – 99.9999% of germs destroyed.It is the only EPA-registered dry mist fogging system – EPA No 84526-6. It is also EU Biocide Article 95 Compliant.

They’re the world’s No 1 appetite stimulant. Which is why 240,000 tonnes of them are added to animal feed every year. Slightly more than the three capsules a day the Doc might put us on for a chest infection.

Yeah, 240,000 tonnes. How else could we ramp up world food production for 2½ billion people to 7½ billion in just 50 years?

Not from medicine, from food production

Forget life-saving and medicine, antibiotics are BIG business – in agriculture.

Massive factories churning out billions of doses to support the super-production of food. Intense and accelerated growth for the 19 billion chickens, 1.4 billion cattle and 1 billion sheep and pigs it takes to feed us – almost 3 chickens for every one of us.

And how effective are antibiotics as growth boosters?

Very.

From egg to full-grown roasting chicken in 6 weeks. From calf to Aberdeen Angus sirloin steak in 16 months instead of four years.

And if they can do that to animals, what can they do to us with basically the same metabolism?

Like animals, our gut bacteria are attacked by antibiotics and many of them killed or damaged – as you know from the Doc, killing bacteria is what antibiotics do.

Business as usual – only fatter

We survive however because there are TRILLIONS of bacteria in our gut – enough to carry on essential work of digesting, producing proteins and managing our immune systems – along with several thousand other vital functions.

Like the animals however, we are no longer the same. The controls that tell us when we’ve had enough to eat are no longer active. There’s NOTHING in our bodies to stop us eating and eating.

And like the animals too, our bacteria are now over-stimulated. They extract MORE nutrients from the food we eat than before. It’s the same food, we just squeeze more out of it. More food value than we need – the fuel tank is over-full.

A condition we call fat.

There is a difference though. The animals are food – their life expectancy is very short. They’re fattened up and eaten, bye-bye.

We fatten up – with our whole life-time ahead of us, thirty, fifty, seventy years. We become obese – with all the complications that can bring. Diabetes, heart disease, cancer – and all the others.

In everything we eat

How can we tell the antibiotics are in our bodies? How do they get there?

The give-away is our waistlines. We never used to be so fat. Not so many of us at once. It’s an obesity epidemic.

Because you haven’t changed the way you eat, have you? You’re still the same as you always were. And the scary part is, you don’t eat all that much anyway – never have done. But now, like two-thirds of all adults in the UK, you’re suddenly fat.

Yeah, well. The antibiotics are in our food. Whatever it is, whatever we eat or drink – they’re in there.

They start in the animals’ food – added to their feedstuff to make them bigger, faster.

But here’s a thing. Animals don’t absorb all the nutrients they eat – some 80-90% of it is pooed out, Nature’s natural fertiliser for every living thing.

And we’re the same. We poo most of our nutrients out too. In China, human waste is prized as the best manure there is. But like the animals, we keep back more for ourselves than we used to – thanks to antibiotics.

The poo trail

OK, so follow the poo trail.

The poo becomes manure which is used for plant crops. Everything across the board – fruit, vegetables, grains – along with feedstuffs like soya and rapeseed.

Plus of course, the plants get fed back to animals, the antibiotics continue being dosed to them – even if the farmer has stopped adding them, to get ready for market.

Which means everything you eat, everything you drink, has antibiotics in it. The manure feeds the plants and antibiotics leach into the soil. They get into the water table, flowing into rivers and streams. Your milk, your tea, your beer has traces of antibiotics in it.

Every mouthful, antibiotics.

So guess what?

Yummy, yummy

You go out for a pizza, and it tastes terrific. Too big to eat another one, but you know you could. Your body processes it anyway, pulling out double the nutrients that it used to before. Good healthy vegetables, healthy cheese, whole-wheat base – where’s the junk?

Ditto for burgers, kebabs, wraps, tortillas -you name it.

Where’s the tartrazine or monosodium glutamate? Where’s all the extra sugar and fat? Seems junk food gets a bad name because it tastes nice. Nothing that rewarding can be good for you, it’s fattening.

Yeah, right.

Thanks to antibiotics, the REAL fattening is internal – your own gut bacteria on the fritz.

We all overdose without knowing it. And action from our health authorities is way overdue

Some overdose. 7.6 million of us makes it 1 in every 10.

Climbing 4 in 10 by 2035.

Nearly half the population of Britain, chopped down by terminal disease.

Condemned to long, slow suffering and years of pain – all from antibiotics.

The end of all of us

Serious stuff from the Obesity Health Alliance – a group of high-powered experts from Cancer Research UK, the British Medical Association, six Royal Colleges and the Royal Society of Public Health.

Quite rightly, they’re sounding alarm bells as our current obesity epidemic takes hold. 18,000 of us a year falling to cancer, rocketing to 38,500 by 2035. 4.62 million new cases of type 2 diabetes. 1.63 million cases of coronary heart disease. A staggering 7.6 million of us.

And that’s not including other obesity-triggered illnesses such as high blood pressure, liver disease, osteoarthritis or chronic kidney disease.

Again quite rightly, the Obesity Health Alliance wants action NOW. Junk food advertising to be banned on TV from 6am to 9pm, food industry limits on sugar and fat – and of course, the much-vaunted sugar tax.

How wrong can we be?

Er, seriously?

Guaranteed, that will achieve nothing.

Junk food doesn’t make people fat – if you can justify calling it that. Fast foods like burgers, pizzas, sandwiches and the like are all good healthy foods that satisfy millions of people who are NOT obese. They don’t get fat eating them – only if they eat too much. If they overdose.

“…many of the dishes glorified by the wholesome-food movement are as caloric and obesogenic as anything served in a Burger King.” David H. Freedman, The Atlantic magazine

Exactly like they would pigging out on avocado and bananas if they ate enough. It’s not the food that’s unhealthy, it’s the act of gorging on it.

The government can pass all the laws they like – control food content, add warning labels, restrict sales to adults over the age of 35 on presentation of their driving licence – it will make no difference. Just as a sugar tax will make no difference either.

Oh sure – in Mexico, sugar tax caused sales to drop by 12%. That’s sales, not consumption. In the dry areas where there is no safe water supply and the local bottled water doesn’t measure up, people are drinking Coke in the same volumes they always did. No change, even though the stuff costs more.

Is anybody watching?

So come on, what’s with our health professionals who should be calling the shots here? The Obesity Health Alliance, the government, Public Health England, the NHS, everybody – they’re all looking the wrong way.

Fact: people only get obese because they consume too much.

They overdose on food.

And they only overdose because their systems are out of balance. Human beings do not naturally overeat. We are not naturally fat – and throughout history, we never have been. Where on this planet are there naturally occurring fat people?

Right, there aren’t any, because they don’t exist.

But all around the world, all kinds of people are suddenly getting fat. They didn’t do that fifty years ago, what’s different?

One word – antibiotics.

But not as the miracle lifesaving drugs we all think they are and rely on them for.

Bigger, better, fatter, faster

For fifty years, antibiotics have been pumped into farm animals daily with their feedstuff – to bulk them up bigger and faster. Extracting more out of the same nutrients in a fraction of the time, they have enabled massive factory farms to mass produce food on a scale so large, our world now supports three times the population that it did fifty years ago – all off the same land area.

2½ billion people in the 1950s, 7½ billion people now – that’s the colossal boosting effect of antibiotics as growth promoters working on our food supply – 240,000 tonnes a year right now, and set to climb nearly 70% by 2030.

Yeah, so why are our health authorities looking past this? Or are they in denial?

Animals eat antibiotics, they get fatter. We eat the same animals, we get fatter. We also eat the vegetables, fruit and plant crops that manure from these same animals fertilise. So that with every single meal, from every single source, we get a daily dose of antibiotics – our daily obesity top-up nudge.

Not junk food, junk drugs

So why isn’t anybody surprised here? We’re sleep-walking into this and nobody even notices. At least after 50 years of smoking, health authorities started to listen – and today it’s a recognised health risk.

No difference with obesity. Not just from eating too much, but from EXTRACTING TOO MUCH food value from the stuff we do eat. Just like the cows and pigs and sheep and chickens, our systems have been glitched by antibiotics, it’s what they’re now programmed to do.

“… roundly demonized junk food companies could do far more for the public’s health in five years than the wholesome-food movement is likely to accomplish in the next 50.” David H. Freedman, The Atlantic magazine

Which means even if you DON’T gorge yourself stupid, or glug Coke by the barrel, as top echelon medics like to think we do – we continue to get fatter and fatter. We never used to do it, but now two-thirds of us are already tipping the scales at the porker level.

So, OK Westminster – let’s see if you’ve got brains. Don’t nanny us with how much sugar is allowed in our food – or how much fat, salt, preservatives, additives, colourants, or any other stuff is in there.

Get tough legislation

Ban the antibiotics. Ban them outright.

It’s too late for us existing fatties, of course – we’re already on the slippery slope – with ten or twenty years of hospital visits to look forward to, and an oversize coffin at the end.

But not for our children.

Pull the plug on this self-inflicted curse we’ve lucked on ourselves – and watch new generations grow up athletic and slim like they’re supposed to be. With stronger immune systems too – not clobbered by the biological cosh of antibiotics.

No more overdoses. No more antibiotics. Healthy at last.

One hell of a problem for modern medicine though. No more protection for intricate procedures, almost all surgery totally impossible.

But that was going to happen with antibiotics resistance anyway. The drugs aren’t working – and they kill us by the way we eat – time to dump them.

Time to let everybody live – and end the biggest overdose of all time.